‘The Long Good Friday’,
‘Red Banner’ reviews the Good Friday Agreement

Joe Craig

1 August 2008

The latest issue of ‘Red Banner’, no. 32,
has a review of the Good Friday Agreement on its tenth anniversary and
the executive it spawned, arguing that, ‘with modifications’, it ‘seems
here to stay’ and that ‘socialists could do with clarifying their attitudes
to them.

On the latter point the review is absolutely
correct. The left has generally failed to present any sort of serious
analysis of the deal and has been more or less supportive of it, with varying
degrees of honesty about their de facto endorsement. It has blissfully
continued on its economistic path, disregarding the big political questions,
and confining itself to the ancient view that socialist politics is nothing
to do with the state, or the forms it takes, but is only properly expressed
in economic questions.

On the former point the author is perhaps
on less sure ground. The many modifications to the Good Friday Agreement
in its ten year history culminated in its replacement with a new deal –
the St. Andrews Agreement. It might be argued that all the amendments
to it are minor and do not fundamentally alter the nature of the political
settlement that has existed since 1998 but to argue this would be a mistake.

The first thing to note is that, as the
article states in its very first sentence, while the Agreement may be ten
years old the executive to actually implement it is only one year old.
This hardly looks like strength and permanency. The many changes
to the Agreement are further proof that it does not contain within it the
germs of a permanent and secure solution. This is important because
there is no reason to believe the current St Andrews deal is the final
version of the process and that it too will not continue to decay; a decay
that will eventually lead to terminal crisis.

Analysis

The article notes that Sinn Fein’s entry
into the current executive came not from a position of strength but from
‘its weakest position in decades.’ This view stands much against
conventional wisdom but it is undoubtedly correct. So is its assertion
that ‘the Good Friday Agreement makes partition work more efficiently by
bringing in an unprecedentedly wide range of political forces to run it.’
Again this also testifies to an underlying vulnerability.

In opposition to the prognoses of the economistic
left the author argues that far from creating the basis for ‘normal’ class-based
politics the ‘Good Friday Agreement has not solved sectarian divisions,
for the straightforward reason that it is based on reaffirming, legitimising
and perpetuating them.’ If at present sectarian tensions seem abated
this rests on exhaustion and fear of a return to past violence; retreat
by republicans on almost every important question and the fact that fundamental
divisions lie beneath the surface and could still provoke political crisis
and violence.

The majority of people in the North are
not aggressive and conscious sectarian bigots but they find themselves
going along with outrageous sectarian arrangements and decisions because
the powers that be promise that the sectarian arrangements set by Good
Friday can assure peace. The absence of any coherent alternative
also plays an important role here. The dismissive attitude of the
author to dissident republicans is fully warranted. Their ineffectual
military activities serve only to strengthen the current political settlement.
If their activities were more successful they might only strengthen it
further.

Thus the author notes that the number of
peace walls has increased in the last ten years and that what has been
created is ‘an atmosphere . . not conducive to cross-community harmony
but to intensified sectarian competition for scarcer resources.’
This brings us to another reason the process, despite internal contradictions,
has not collapsed: there has been, like most other countries, an economic
upturn in which unemployment has been relatively low and expenditure also
supported by rising debt. This too is vulnerable, in fact it is now
evaporating before our eyes.

At one point in 2007 house prices in the
North were rising faster than anywhere else in the world. This year
a report has recorded that of all parliamentary constituencies in the UK
the North contains some of the most vulnerable to increased housing costs
and the disaster of negative equity. Increased interest rates caused
by the credit crunch thus threatens to undermine this prosperity and reveal
the same old structural problems of the northern economy which have not
been solved.

Division

The article also examines some of the ideological
arguments that have supported the imperialist settlement. It trenchantly
argues against the idea that partition is in any way justified or that
Irish Protestants should have their own state. ‘A worker afraid
of being over-run by Catholics, immigrants or gays will be in no position
to advance his own class interests.’ The left should not respect
‘people’s right to a British identity. Unionist or loyalist identity
isn’t actually British at all.’ She accurately speculates that the
consequences of repartition, put forward by one British left group as a
democratic solution, would either be ‘merely tragic or truly horrific.’

In three sentences Maeve Connaughton puts
the issue clearly. ‘The nettle has to be grasped. Increasingly,
the left is falling in with the conventional wisdom that it is best to
let sleeping dogs lie. But the longer this particular dog is left
unchallenged, the more ferocious its teeth are likely to be bared.’
She goes on - ‘differences within the working class can only be overcome
by confronting them, not by acting as if they didn’t exist.’ The
Irish left however thinks only in term of existing consciousness.
Its shared view that what is wrong is a ‘crisis of representation’ leads
it far away from tasks which require confronting and challenging conventional
wisdom and bourgeois manufactured public opinion. Nothing could be
worse than leaving opposition to the Good Friday Agreement and what has
followed it to failed republican politics.

The article notes that there has been a
growth in sectarianism among Catholics – ‘the growing feeling in the northern
nationalist community that ‘we’ are advancing and getting one over on ‘them’
is pathetic and pernicious.’ When this particular bubble eventually
bursts disappointed communal grievances expressed in sectarian terms will
not have adjectives like ‘pathetic’ applied to it but will definitely be
much more pernicious. Unless, that is, there is some socialist analysis
of the failure of this green sectarianism and a real alternative to it
put forward on the ground.

In the latter case there is absolutely
no point calling on left unity as a major step to achieving this.
The left is simply not interested in the task of really confronting sectarianism.
It acts simply as if it was not important. The national question,
constitutional question or the nature of the state – however one wants
to describe it – is simply not an issue for them. All those who think
it is central to destroying sectarianism need to unite, but should not
kid themselves that this involves the somewhat larger left groups.
As the author says ‘a socialism that dodges awkward questions will get
no more than it deserves.’

Method

The article finishes with a quote from
Connolly which I have not come across before or, if I did, did not recognise
its significance and importance. It is in the context of Connolly’s
defence of being open about support for Irish independence and questions
from other socialists whether he thought this would make their task any
easier. “I answered them that I did not, that on the contrary it
would arouse passions immensely more bitter than had even been met here
by the Socialist movement in the past, but that it would make our propaganda
more fruitful and our organisation more enduring.”

This is exactly right. This sums
up precisely why it is absolutely necessary to fight against the Good Friday
Agreement and the imperialist peace settlement. The method of Connolly
is not to avoid hard questions, not to avoid confronting reactionary and
confused attitudes and beliefs in the working class but to build a movement
that directly confronts them – ‘it would make our propaganda more fruitful
and our organisation more enduring.’

To present this in its opposite sense:
the continuing attitude that reactionary political views can be overcome
by more progressive opinions on economic questions is not at all fruitful
and is exceedingly temporary as the history of the repeated (usually very
minor) success has shown over many years, in strikes involving Protestant
and Catholic workers and in the examples of anti-war activity around Iraq.
The left has not grown on the basis of the many examples of such activity
because the political weakness of the workers involved has not been challenged
as a matter of policy.

This approach is not limited to the North
and neither therefore is Connolly’s method. At the moment a key task
is to politically organise and strengthen the Lisbon No vote. It
is obvious to almost everyone who honestly wishes to understand it that
this vote was a confused one and that progressive impulses coexisted with
quite reactionary ones. The first thing is to acknowledge this.
The second is to wage a struggle against those reactionary aspects of No
and to draw clear borders between these and more progressive inspirations.
This can only be done by beginning to put a global critique of the EU together
and the nature of an alternative.

In our view this can only be a socialist
critique involving an internationalist alternative. This is not currently
the priority of much of the left. Instead they say we must have a
‘new’ left to solve a crisis of representation, to represent the No vote.
In fact there is no evidence that either the people or politics involved
in this will be ‘new’ in any sense.

There is every reason to fear that there
will be an attempt to build on a lowest common denominator basis that,
like on the North, is afraid of facing the hard issues – attacking the
Irish corporation tax rate, exposing the State’s fake neutrality, opposing
without compromise social partnership and the trade union bureaucracy,
proposing an internationalist alternative and opposing narrow Irish nationalism.

As Connolly said, this ‘would make our
propaganda more fruitful and our organisation more enduring’ not more easy;
but then nothing worthwhile was ever easy.

The latest issue of Red Banner is worth
buying for this article alone.

Red Banner can ordered from PO Box 6587,
Dublin 6 or from red_banner@yahoo.com.